mrs. mcdonald and the nursery school

my grandmother started a nursery school. i don't know the year. the story i've heard told is that it was started because my grandfather, ever tight with a dollar, told my grandmother "one pair of shoes per child is enough." and my grandmother was going to be damned if her children wore the same shoes to church that they had been wearing on the playground. so she started this business to buy shoes for her children. i don't know if that really was the catalyst, but somehow it cements for me the image of the relationship they had. and while it's not the relationship i'd wish for myself, it does give a pretty good picture of my grandmother--stubborn, committed, passionate and thinking first about her children.

my grandparents divorced when i was really little--maybe 4 or 5. and i never knew of a time when they shared a bedroom. her bedroom had two single beds, with matching light blue comforters, scratchy sheets and one pillow on each bed and the lamp in the middle, between the beds, and it looked like that iconic image most of imagine when we picture ward and june's bedroom.

so my memories of my grandparents, as a little kid, were much less of my grandfather, and more of my grandmother. i think it is safe to say that i was, i am, the apple of her eye. the only grandchild until i was 21, this woman adored and still does adore me. my earliest years were spent at her house, where baby-Sarah would attend Mrs. McDonald's nursery school (my years in high school were ones of reminding people who were a few years older that it was no longer appropriate to call me baby-Sarah). and when i was older, i would take such delight in being the special one at nursery school, who would always have lunch with Mrs. McDonald after nursery school was over.

i was the last "class" of Mrs. McDonald's nursery school. when i was old enough to go to kindergarten, she called it quits and went back to nursing school. the highest scoring nurse at crawford-long memorial when she was in school as a teenager, the nurse in her returned for a brief stint. i remember her practicing giving shots on oranges and it terrified me. but more than anything, i remember her, for the first time in my life, gone. she would leave athens and spend the week in atlanta for her refresher course. having grown up with her taking care of me, her house my second home, her home the common place for dinner at least twice a week--it was a dramatic shift.

eventually her nursing career ended and she sold the house and became a sorority house mother. and that was a whole new adventure. suddenly, i shared her with a house full of college girls who all dressed in plaid and ribbons. but it never mattered. i was still first in her eyes. and teacher or nurse or housemother, the core of how i saw her was the same: the woman with the bedroom with the two single beds, covered in blue, lamp in the middle; the woman who cared for me when i was sick and my parents were at work; the one whose face lit up when i walked in, even when i was a mess. the thing about my grandmother was that in her home, whether a house, or a condo, or a sorority, there was always room for me. i always had a key, i always knew the combination. and when my world began changing, when the keys and the doors of my own home became less and less available, there was, somewhere in my world, always a place where i was wanted. and she was it.

my grandmother, having lived with alzheimer's for years now, is back to living in the room with the single bed. this one is draped in white hospital sheets, white hospital blankets, the familiar nursing home hospital bed. but she still knows me. i am, after all these years, still the apple of her eye.

yesterday the doctors decided that the mass on her lung that has, for so long, been assumed to be pneumonia, was, is cancer. how one treats (or doesn't treat) cancer in an almost-90-year-old-woman-with-dementia is still up in the air. the one thing that is clear is that it, most likely, won't be long now.

she's my last grandparent left. i never knew my father's parents and my relationship with my grandfather was so very different, always from a far. so this is new ground for me. in some ways, she has been gone for such a long time and yet, with dementia, with age, comes a whole new person--lacking in memory, yet rich in adoration for the world as it is now, in this moment, which is all she has, and really all any of us has. and so begins the navigation of the new land, the different space, the road which has yet to be revealed. i'm not sure i'm ready to walk it just yet.